Multispectral coherence

1Formerly The University of Oklahoma, ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics, Norman, Oklahoma, USA; presently University of Georgia, College of Engineering, Athens, Georgia, USA. E-mail: fangyu.li@uga.edu; clintfangyu@gmail.com.

Abstract

Seismic coherence is a routine measure of seismic reflection similarity for interpreters seeking structural boundary and discontinuity features that may be not properly highlighted on original amplitude volumes. One mostly wishes to use the broadest band seismic data for interpretation. However, because of thickness tuning effects, spectral components of specific frequencies can highlight features of certain thicknesses with higher signal-to-noise ratio than others. Seismic stratigraphic features (e.g., channels) may be buried in the full-bandwidth data, but can be “lit up” at certain spectral components. For the same reason, coherence attributes computed from spectral voice components (equivalent to a filter bank) also often provide sharper images, with the “best” component being a function of the tuning thickness and the reflector alignment across faults. Although one can corender three coherence images using red-green-blue (RGB) blending, a display of the information contained in more than three volumes in a single image is difficult. We address this problem by combining covariance matrices for each spectral component, adding them together, resulting in a “multispectral” coherence algorithm. The multispectral coherence images provide better images of channel incisement, and they are less noisy than those computed from the full bandwidth data. In addition, multispectral coherence also provides a significant advantage over RGB blended volumes. The information content from unlimited spectral voices can be combined into one volume, which is useful for a posteriori/further processing, such as color corendering display with other related attributes, such as petrophysics parameters plotted against a polychromatic color bar. We develop the value of multispectral coherence by comparing it with the RGB blended volumes and coherence computed from spectrally balanced, full-bandwidth seismic amplitude volume from a megamerge survey acquired over the Red Fork Formation of the Anadarko Basin, Oklahoma.

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